How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy – more evidence that we are all merely conveyances, and the Toxoplasma gondii organisms are the ones who are really in charge… 😐
Category Archives: toxoplasma gondii
another one
i don’t really know why anybody would be tempted to try kopi luwak, but if anybody was ever curious, there’s a new-ish article from sprudge that says that it’s not anywhere near as good as people claim it is, which includes a coffee judge saying things like “One of four cups was moldy and another single cup showed phenol. I tasted band-aids, iodine, and oyster.”
bleah! 😕
not only that, but apparently the increased demand (damn internet!) has created an industry where they catch and cage civet cats and force-feed them coffee cherries in order to create the supply needed to sate the palates of these would-be coffee gourmets… not exactly my cup of… well, coffee… 😐
another week closer to the eschaton…
we’ll start out this week’s post with a public service announcement: National Chronic Illness Awareness Week is coming up 13-19 september. be nice to somebody: one in two americans has an invisible chronic illness or condition!
Predator drones patrols of southern US border start Wednesday – this is now a police state, where only the priveledged live, the starving refugee is given temporary status, and the illegal immigrant is hunted down and summarily killed ejected.
example: California Cops Taser Senior Citizen in His Own Home – couple returns home, man falls, wife calls 911, cops show up and taser man when he refuses to go with them. beware – this could happen in your home, to you.
Oil Rig Explodes Off The Louisiana coast – didn’t we already go through this once? and, by the way, we now have a BP ultimatum: Let us drill or funds will dry up – considering that it took them all of a week to make the money that they have spent on cleaning up the spill, i think that they could go a little while longer before they are completely out of money…
More War Lies – war is peace, love is hate, lies are truth… business as usual.
Stephen Hawking Breaks Atheist Rules – yep, he said there doesn’t have to be a “god” in order for everything to be here. broke the rules, indeed… Is Stephen Hawking’s New Book Science or Science Fiction – “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi
Top Web Scams of the Decade – in other words, if you don’t know that you shouldn’t respond to random, sketchy-sounding email from someone you don’t know, you probably shouldn’t be online at all. Pew Study Claims One Fifth Of American Adults Don’t Use The Internet – i’ve got an idea: make it so that you have to have a license to use an internet-connected device, in the same way that you now have to have a license to drive a car. kill two birds with one stone…
Budget cuts bring end to Stockton narcotics unit – hey, let’s move to stockton! 8)
California pot legalization ‘could end Mexican drug war’ and Marijuana activists stage Mexico City smoke-out to protest prohibition – hint: legalisation of cannabis could go a long way towards ending the war on drugs everywhere…
The Pain-Killing Power of Marijuana – especially with people like this guy’s brother pumping out new research…
Two new scientific studies reveal hallucinogens are good for your mental health – another thing hallucinogens are good for! 8)
Ancient brew masters tapped drug secrets – another thing beer is good for! 8)
Mind-Altering Parasites – toxoplasma gondii on the loose!
沯
Toxoplasma Modified Humans – i’m glad to see that people who actually know what they’re talking about are looking into this, because i have been suspicious of Toxoplasma gondii for number of years, and this guy seems to be talking about the same stuff that i’ve been wondering about for a long time. the big question is: is ‘the meaning of life’ merely to accelerate the reproductive cycle of a parasitic protozoa? disturbingly, it also sounds suspiciously like the scientologists’ story about microscopic aliens controlling our behaviour…
Can we arrest him now? – i guess the phrase about “liberty and justice for all” was only for some people… 😐
all the strange stuff, all at once
for those of you who are actually going to the moisture festival on saturday evening – the 10:30 show only – you will be priveledged to see the new Big Bois With Poise performance, and because of that (and because of the fact that i’ve been sworn to secrecy) i will not post pictures of the outrageous costumes that are a part of this year’s show. after saturday i may post them. stay tuned.
Cat poo coffee: $100 a cup – this doesn’t have much to do with toxoplasmosa gondii, but once again, it makes me wonder if we’re not all just puppets, and the real rulers of the world are these bizarre microscopic organisms… watch, as i get older i’ll get more and more convinced of this to the point where i’ll become obsessed with ridding the world of this microscopic menace… you wait… it will happen…
West Chester Gorilla Suit Construction Workshop – damn, i wish i lived closer… 8/
??????????????????????????????????2?????0410?????????????????? – no, it’s not japanese spam, but if you would like an anglicised version, thank ThinkGeek for at least partially translating it… these japanese are crazy!
this is ridiculous! it’s why i’m against work in general, but this goes far beyond just work. why don’t they take an earlier, or later train to avoid having to shove them in like this? and these days, why don’t they telecommute? especially in japan… i’ve said this more than once today, but these japanese are crazy!
Malware still malingering for up-to-date anti-virus users – apparently having anti-virus software and keeping it up to date is no longer enough to keep from geting infected by malware… if you use windoesn’t… if you use mac or linux, their virus detection software – courtesy of panda reaserch – doesn’t even work! no wonder i’ve been reading recently about how windows is collapsing…
whew!
yesterday was full of incense orders, appointments, and rehearsals. i got up in time to go to my 10:00 appointment with the DVR lady and her business consultant (more about this later), and discovered that i had a $35 incense order. so i put the order together and was printing out the invoice when i realised that the person to whom i am sending it lives in the UK, which means that i have to figure out extra postage, and then write to them requesting that extra postage before i ship it. as of 1:30 today (more than 24 hours after i sent the request, i still haven’t got a reply from them. i hope it doesn’t turn out that they only notice when their order doesn’t come and they file a complaint with paypal… 8/ ). in any event, the result of all this was that i left about 15 minutes late for my appointment. fortunately i was able to call and let them know, so they woudln’t decide that i wasn’t there and decide not to help me at all.
i ended up getting to my appointment about 5 minutes late, but then i ended up sitting in the lobby for about 15 minutes before someone came out and told me that the appointment was actually scheduled for 10:30, not 10:00, and that the business consultant hadn’t arrived yet. 8/
finally the business consultant arrived, and she, the DVR lady and i talked about Hybrid Elephant for about 2½ hours. she ended up saying not very much that made me feel as though they actually are going to help me, including a blanket statement, which she did clarify later on, that the DVR won’t help people who are interested in self employment. she did qualify this by saying that those people who do get help from DVR with self employment are a lot more likely to be people who fit into the “niche markets” rather than the “fringe economy”, and that, on the surface, Hybrid Elephant sounded a lot more like the latter than the former. however she did say that it has very definite “niche market” potential, and that i should endeavour to work more towards developing those things, which included print brokering and musical instrument repair – neither of which are entirely out of the question, although both could use some help that i either can’t afford, or don’t know how to give them before they become anything like sustainable business material.
i had hoped to come home and take a shower before going to my 3:00 appointment with ned, but as it was i had just about enough time to come home, slam down something to eat, throw my trombone in the car and head out again. i made it to my appointment with about 15 minutes to spare, and when it got out, there wasn’t much point in driving more than i had to, so i drove up to ballard and took a nap until it was time for my BSSB rehearsal, from which i got home at 10:00, at which point i was so tired that i fell asleep on the couch.
that being said, here are a few things that i have found interesting from the past couple of days:
Cats Help Shield Owners From Heart Attack – this makes me wonder a lot about what toxoplasma gondii has, if anything, to do with it… and i, personally, can’t imagine how toxoplasma gondii could not have anything to do with it, considering how prevalent and insidious the microbe is…
The day the wiretaps go dead is about warrantless wiretapping, and how ordinary citizens can secure their communications against such travesties of democracy, while our supposedly democratically elected leaders are going about the business from a completely different angle: House Steers Its Own Path on Wiretaps. we can only hope that they will continue to be successful, if we want to keep democracy around.
finally, we have Crazy ‘Pot Will Make You Sell Your Children’ Warning from Otherwise Sane Senator, which just goes to show how far we have yet to go… 8/
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this article doesn’t have anything directly to do with toxoplasma gondii, but it raises the question of why cats “domesticated themselves”, especially considering how prevalent toxoplasma gondii has become in human beings as a result of their interactions with cats… i’ve just got to wonder what the toxoplasma gondii microbe is really up to…
Genetic Research Suggests Felines ‘Domesticated Themselves’
June 29, 2007
By David Brown
Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.
But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way — about 12,000 years, actually.
Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science.
The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today’s tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship. Continue reading 1038